KANSAS CITY – “Last year in the City of St. Louis we had 159 homicides, 138 through gun violence, and more than 90 percent of the victims were young, African-American males,” St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer M. Joyce, the city’s elected prosecutor, said Monday, February 23 at Kansas City Police Department headquarters. “We can not have that again.”
That “never again” determination explains why Joyce led a delegation of law enforcement and criminal justice officials from St. Louis to Kansas City, which marked a 50-year low in homicides in 2014.
Joyce, U.S. Attorney Richard Callahan from Missouri’s Eastern District, St. Louis City Counselor Winston Calvert, St. Louis Public Safety Director Richard Gray, St. Louis Police Captain Michael Sack and other officials attended the Monday morning Governing Board meeting of the Kansas City No Violence Alliance (NoVA). They were joined by a judge, as well as a senior probation and parole official.
Joyce, who has been traveling nationally in recent months to study effective homicide-deterrence models, hopes to implement some of NoVA’s collaborative efforts that are credited with driving down Kansas City’s homicide rate.
Like that of St. Louis, the homicide rate in Kansas City is roughly five times the national average. For young black males, the homicide rate in these cities is higher than the homicide rate of American soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Ken Novak, a professor of criminology at University of Missouri – Kansas City (UMKC).
Novak and his colleague Andrew M. Fox are both “embedded criminologists” working directly with Joyce’s counterpart in Kansas City, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker.
Peters Baker, who opened the session Monday morning, said she instituted NoVA in 2011 in partnership with then-newly elected Kansas City Mayor Sly James, Police Chief Darryl Forte and Beth Phillips, then-U.S. attorney for Western Missouri and now a federal judge.
Critical to NoVA is the collaboration between law enforcement agencies to prevent violent crimes, rather than prosecute them – and the active involvement of criminologists to help prevent crimes, rather than merely study them after the damage is done.
The coalition also includes clergy, who host focused public meetings where law enforcement officials directly address the individuals in the community they have identified as most likely to commit the next violent crime. At these meetings, the targeted individuals are directly offered social services – social workers are included in the NoVA partnership. These individuals are also warned that the next homicide in the city will meet with instant and focused enforcement activity from every angle.
Peters Baker said the most dangerous groups on the streets today are not affiliated members of large organized gangs like the Bloods and the Crips, which can be targeted under federal organized crime statutes.
“But these are groups of people who, when they get together, commit violence,” Peters Baker said. “Who cares what their names is – ‘gang,’ ‘group.’ We were still looking for grand, structured organizations that we can take down, but it doesn’t work that way anymore.”
Now street criminals are organized in smaller, looser affiliations that move rapidly from allies to enemies, Peters Baker said – and the switch to enemy status is often met with violence, which in turn provokes retaliatory violence.
These groups are identified and studied using social network analysis, as Andrew M. Fox, an embedded criminologist from UMKC, explained to the St. Louis delegation on Monday. It is the same technology used in recent years to study the transmission of infectious diseases and the connections between and within international terrorist networks.
“Homicide spreads a lot like disease spreads,” Fox said. “We know that who is likely to be shot next is socially connected to people who have already been shot.”
Novak pointed to data that 0.5 percent of the population in Cincinnati – only half of 1 percent – was responsible for nearly 75 percent of the city’s homicides, 2006-2007.
To perform social network analysis, Fox recommended a free software called “Pajek,” the Slovene word for “spider” – and indeed, once mapped, gang affiliations do look like a large, loose and deadly spider web.
The critical tactic for this analytic tool, Fox explained, is to identify the nodes in the network, those individuals who are associated with the largest number of other individuals or responsible for connecting the most clusters of other individuals. Those are the high-risk individuals targeted by NoVA and offered social services if they want to put down the gun – and threatened with focused reprisals if they go back to violence.
Those focused reprisals, Peters Baker said, include everything the coalition of law enforcement agencies can throw at the members of a group that commits violence. The coalition combs through warrants and municipal violations looking for every infraction, however small. “You know, like you can bundle your phone and cable bill?” Peters Baker said the gang members are warned. “We will bundle every charge we have against you.” What matters most is that law enforcement officials deliver on their promise of punishment.
“Everyone has different levers they can pull,” Novak said. “The probation and parole office has levers that the police don’t have. This can’t simply be a police thing.”
Another radical change here is switching law enforcement focus from high-risk individuals to individuals involved in the most high-risk relationships, because reaching those people has the most impact on other people in the gang or group.
Fox said this type of data analysis is succeeding in police work because “it’s what law enforcement officials do on a daily basis,” but it employs statistical models that enable them to analyze more data than is possible by the human mind (or by understaffed police departments and prosecutor offices).
After the data are crunched, human beings still need to work together – and collaborate across agencies that often have long-standing patterns of distrust and suspicion. Baker was candid in stressing that the communication between police, prosecutors, probation and parole officers, and social workers in NoVA has broken down repeatedly and remains a work in progress.
“We have to step out of our comfort zones and do our jobs as we have never done before,” Baker said. “We have to stop pointing fingers. The partnership has to be strong to withstand the scrutiny.”
It’s this type of innovative partnership that Joyce now hopes to assemble in St. Louis. “If Kansas City can do it, St. Louis can do it,” Joyce said on Monday. “And I plan to be in a leadership role of doing it.”
